A shiny new toy! Chrome.
Anyone who knows me, especially those clients that I harange about using Internet Explorer, will know that I have been a fan of Firefox since version 1.0. They will also know that now that Firefox has matured to version 3 and has a bucket load of extensions I not only use it myself, but push it on my clients.
Lately I have also been experimenting with an offshoot of Firefox called Flock which offers all of the safer Firefox browsing with an interface more suited to social browsing, in other words it plugs in all of the Facebook, Flickr and Twitter stuff that is nice to have at your fingertips. The only downside is that it is built on Version 2 of Firefox, to get all of Firefox 3′s goodness in Flock you need to grab the Beta version, which I found slightly unstable on my setup.
So with all of this browser hopping you would wonder why I would even bother downloading Chrome, the new browser from Google. Well the truth is, and I have only just admitted it to myself, is that I am becoming a bit of a Google fanboy (the shame). I route all of my mail though Gmail, I use Google Docs as a backup / file transfer system, I get most of my news through Google Reader and of course like many others I use their search almost excusivley.
After a brief self orientation I am finding Chrome feels faster than both Firefox 3 and Flock. I currently have it open with a dozen tabs and it pops up almost instantly on my Dell M1330. Flicking between the tabs is very fast and the way tabs can be moved around and manipulated is handy. It has crashed on me once whilst I was changing something on the new Facebook site.
All in all I would recommend it for people who like a clean interface, fast no frills browsing and are interested in using it for web apps, which can be set up to run in their own instanced window of chrome (almost like a stand alone app). I think it may take a while for me to be conviced that it will do as my main browser, although a few good extensions and I could see this pushing Flock and Firefox in the same direction I sent Internet Explorer.
